By SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN

March 7, 2014

Stories about charming scoundrels have a built-in appeal, especially if the scoundrel is young and handsome — and of course he must be very smart. Think of Leonardo Di Caprio in “Catch Me if You Can,” or of Thomas Mann’s comic con man Felix Krull. How do they fool so many people for so long?

A similar question underlies the story told by Evelyn Barish in “The Double Life of Paul de Man.” Barish, a retired professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center, has devoted many years to tracking the elusive trail of the noted literary scholar who made headlines posthumously in 1988, after a researcher in Belgium discovered the trove of literary criticism he had published in that country’s leading pro-Nazi newspaper during World War II. De Man, who had emigrated to the United States in 1948, earned a doctorate at Harvard in 1960 and went on to a dazzling academic career, forming a generation of devoted disciples. When he died in 1983 at age 64, he was a revered figure. The author of brilliant if difficult essays on modern literature, he had been among the first to embrace deconstruction, the influential theory elaborated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction focused on linguistic ambiguity, infuriating critics who viewed it as a dangerous relativism.

The discovery of de Man’s collaborationist past (he had never spoken about it even to close friends) became an occasion for heated debates. How could one square the writings of the erudite scholar with those of the brash young collaborator whose opinions, viewed today, look appalling? Defenders of de Man argued that his early and late writings were worlds apart (figuratively and literally), indeed that the later theories implicitly repudiated his early views. Detractors maintained that despite obvious differences, the two were cut from the same intellectual cloth: The ideas about “undecidability” in language were an elaborate cover-up for past sins. The most hostile critics seized the opportunity to strike a decisive blow against deconstruction, as a doctrine with unavowable antecedents in Nazism.

Now, almost 30 years later, when the theoretical avant-garde has moved on, “The Double Life of Paul de Man” revives the man and his fall. This time, we get a story of the professor not just as a young collaborator, but as a scheming careerist, an embezzler and forger who fled Belgium in order to avoid prison, a bigamist who abandoned his first three children, a deadbeat who left many rents and hotel bills unpaid, a liar who wormed his way into Harvard by falsifying records, a cynic who used people shamelessly. Some of these accusations have been made before (and documented), but Barish develops them and adds new ones. Her conclusion is somber: She places de Man not among the charming scoundrels but among the false “new messiahs” of history.

Admirably, she has consulted far-flung archives, pored over unpublished documents, conducted interviews with dozens of de Man’s relatives, friends and acquaintances. Her account of his chaotic childhood and adolescence, marked by his older brother’s death and his mother’s suicide, is compelling. Her story about his early adventures in New York is picaresque: The penniless, handsome young immigrant (his blond good looks are mentioned repeatedly) ascends, in the space of a few months and at the price of a few lies, into the inner circle of one of the city’s most exclusive intellectual salons (Dwight Macdonald’s), where he meets the powerful older woman who sponsored him (Mary McCarthy, who got him a temporary teaching job at Bard College). But when Barish starts to speculate that the young adventurer may have made McCarthy pregnant (she had a miscarriage), basing the speculation on slim circumstantial evidence (he was visiting her and her husband during the summer when the child was probably conceived, then stopped seeing them; a year later, McCarthy wrote a nasty letter about him to a professor at Bard), the reader’s hackles go up. Is this narrator reliable?

In fact, with a careful reading of the book, hackles go up quite early. Among the most damaging claims made by Barish is that de Man, besides his role as a literary columnist at the collaborationist newspaper Le Soir (which some called Le Soir volé, to distinguish the “stolen” publication from its prewar version), was scheming to start “a luxurious art journal whose raison d’être would be to promote the entire range of the most bizarre Nazi ideologies. Its editor in chief would be Paul de Man.” This charge is based on a document signed by Le Soir’s editor in chief, de Man’s boss, Raymond De Becker, who was condemned to death for treason after the war, in part for promoting this idea (De Becker’s sentence was later commuted). The proposed magazine would be financed by the German Foreign Office and would have De Becker as publisher and de Man as “secretary of the editorial board — that is, its editor.”

The magazine never got off the ground, but the handwritten prospectus for it was part of the prosecutor’s dossier at De Becker’s postwar trial. According to Barish, the prosecutor “chose to ignore or did not notice that the closing pages . . . of the document were in a different handwriting, which was that of Paul de Man.” The author makes an enormous leap of judgment here, but does not substantiate it. She reports that one of the people she interviewed, who worked with both men at Le Soir, identified De Becker’s handwriting “instantly” on a copy of the prospectus, but she gives no indication that she asked him about de Man’s handwriting. Even more sweepingly, she asserts that “internal evidence suggests that the idea” for the magazine “probably originated with de Man” — a hugely incriminating claim, but again unsubstantiated. This kind of vagueness occurs at other crucial moments as well, along with hypotheses that turn into “facts” a few lines or pages later.

The reader is asked to take a lot on faith, starting with faith in the author’s judgment and in her knowledge of language and history. In this instance, one’s faith is shaken not only by the imprecision, but by at least two factual errors. In French, neither “editor in chief” nor “editor” corresponds to “secretary of the editorial board,” the job Barish says De Becker listed for his 22-year-old protégé. The secretary of the editorial board is in charge of shepherding articles through the editorial process, not setting policy. A small error, to be sure, but it makes one question Barish’s claim that de Man was the mastermind behind the Nazi magazine project. And the way she formulates that claim signals another error: De Man, she says, had earlier organized the Prix Rossel, a major Belgian literary prize awarded by Le Soir, equivalent to France’s Prix Goncourt. The Prix Rossel is indeed prestigious (it is still being awarded annually in Belgium), but it was discontinued while Le Soir was under Nazi control. The prize de Man was involved with was a different one, concocted for the circumstances. It’s not clear who thought it up, though Barish once again moves from hypothesis to “fact” in attributing the major role to de Man.

This too may seem a small error, but there are too many of them, and they tend to distort an already complicated story. That’s not to mention the ham-fisted explanations when Barish ventures into philosophy, or intellectual and literary history. Reading her comments on de Man’s ideas, or on Bataille’s or Sartre’s, is like watching a film out of focus — it’s all there, but very approximate.

Does this mean de Man was innocent? Hardly. But his story deserves a less biased and more knowledgeable telling.

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF PAUL DE MAN

By Evelyn Barish

Illustrated. 534 pp. Liveright Publishing. $35.

Susan Rubin Suleiman, a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of “Crises of Memory and the Second World War,” among other books, and a co-editor of “French Global: A New Approach to Literary History.”